Separate but equal

For the film about the Brown v. Board of Education trial, see Separate But Equal (film).

Separate but equal is a set phrase (or idiom) that was commonly used in the United States to describe systems of segregation giving different "colored only" facilities or services for blacks, with the declaration that the quality of each group's public facilities were (supposedly) to remain equal. The phrase was derived from a Louisiana law of 1890.

It was also the title of an anonymous article written in 1869, detailing how people had equal rights but were separated because of race.

United States

The American Civil War (1861–1865) policy yielded the cessation of most legal slavery in the U.S., however not the intent of a different class of citizen. Before the end of the war, the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act (Morrill Act of 1862) was passed to provide for funding to higher education. After the end of the war, the second Morrill act (Morrill Act of 1880) established the legal concept of separate but equal, upon which the separate but equal laws became officially established throughout the United States and represented the institutionalization of the segregation period.

Provided, That no money shall be paid out under this act to any State or Territory for the support and maintenance of a college where a distinction of race or color is made in the admission of students, but the establishment and maintenance of such colleges separately for white and colored students shall be held to be a compliance with the provisions of this act if the funds received in such State or Territory be equitably divided as hereinafter set forth.

Blacks were entitled to receive the same public services such as schools, bathrooms, and water fountains, but the 'separate but equal' doctrine mandated different facilities for the two groups. The legitimacy of such laws was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537.

A restaurant in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1938.

The facilities and social services exclusive to African-Americans were of lower quality than those reserved for whites; for example, many African-American schools received less public funding per student than nearby white schools.

The repeal of "separate but equal" laws was a key focus of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. In Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), attorneys for the NAACP referred to the phrase "equal but separate" used in Plessy v. Ferguson as a custom de jure racial segregation enacted into law. The NAACP, led by the soon-to-be first black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, was successful in challenging the constitutional viability of the separate but equal doctrine, and the court voted to overturn sixty years of law that had developed under Plessy. The Supreme Court outlawed segregated public education facilities for blacks and whites at the state level. The companion case of Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 outlawed such practices at the Federal level in the District of Columbia.

Even though the policy of separate but equal education had been overturned, it would be almost ten more years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would extinguish the social policy of separate but equal. Additionally, in 1967 under Loving v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court declared Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute, the "Racial Integrity Act of 1924", unconstitutional, thereby ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage ("anti-miscegenation laws") in the United States.

The phrase "separate but equal" has been more recently used by supporters of same-sex marriage to argue for full marriage rights for same-sex couples.